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Reading Proudhon Today

November 16, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur
There is a lot of interesting material in Proudhon’s unpublished manuscripts, not all of which is vital to understanding his project, but there are two sets of texts in particular that any serious student should at least be aware of—if only to know what we don’t know.

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Further Reflections on Anarchist Tendencies and Mutualist History

September 28, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur
This is a collection of another Twitter thread, in the course of which I’ve been sharing some reminiscences on how “neo-proudhonian” mutualism emerged and how those who have adopted the label or encounter it in anarchist circles might understand the particular gambits involved in its construction. These things necessarily get away from us, once loosed upon the world—and that’s fine, perhaps simply as it should be—but I suspect they may serve others better if they retain some of the character of their origins.  

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Reflections on Anarchist Tendencies and Mutualist History

August 9, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur
So much energy is wasted in debating anarchist labels that we imagine designate historical tendencies with clear programs, but mostly emerged from contexts where the rich diversity of anarchist ideas was reduced to forms appropriate for some earlier round of sectarian debate. Most of the keywords we fight over in anarchist circles are neither that sort of label not anti-concepts. They are the sort of obvious constructions (individualism, socialism, mutualism, capitalism, feminism, etc.) that you would to be contested in ideology-centered discourse.

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A Schematic Anarchism (Introduction)

April 27, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur
One way to get at what is constant in the widest senses of anarchy and anarchism is to begin with what is least contestable about the elements of those terms. Etymology is certainly no definitive source of meaning — and few things are more tiresome than the attempt to resolve ideological debates with dictionaries — but if we are going to take inspiration from the interpretive freedom extended by Proudhon to his readers, we don’t really have much but the words themselves as references.

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A Schematic Anarchism (draft)

March 6, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur
Conscious of the difficulties faced by students of anarchist ideas, whether newcomers or old hands, it seems useful to propose some means of exploring the field with confidence. There is no question, particularly in a short piece such as this, of providing a map of that vast, complex territory, but we can certainly identify a few landmarks and propose some tools with which individuals might do their own mapping.

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Notes on the Development of Proudhon’s Thought

October 4, 2021 Shawn P. Wilbur
Related links: These notes will obviously be of most use to those who have followed previous discussions of the individual texts, but it represents what seems to be a fairly promising attempt to deal with the shifting terms of Proudhon’s analysis from 1839 until his death and, as such, may be useful to others, if only as a bit more concrete suggestion that such a resolution is possible. Its early stages have been worked out on social media and it consists of: Two Twitter Threads… I. I’m back to wrestling with Proudhon’s Federative Principle. It’s a weird text, with anarchist […]
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Fresh Summer Threads

August 3, 2021 Shawn P. Wilbur
My sense is that anarchy is always related to the enormous quantities of collective force emerging from modern social organization. In otherwise archic, governmentalist societies, it manifests as an often destructive force, threatening governments but not sparing the people.

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Collective Force: Notes on Contribution and Disposition

September 7, 2020 Shawn P. Wilbur
Related links: “The Anatomy of the Encounter” (September 7, 2013) “Property, Individuality and Collective Force” (January 28, 2016) “Rambles in the Fields of Anarchist Individualism — No. 5” (August 3, 2020) “Letter to « l’en dehors » from Max Nettlau” (1922) A force of one thousand men working twenty days has been paid the same wages that one would be paid for working fifty-five years; but this force of one thousand has done in twenty days what a single man could not have accomplished, though he had labored for a million centuries. Is the exchange an equitable one? Once more, […]